John William De Forest (1826-1906) published two travel narratives: Oriental Acquaintance; Or, Letters from Syria (1856) and European Acquaintance; Being Sketches of People in Europe (1858). He went to the Near East in 1846--first to his brother's medical mission in Syria--with a young man's intense curiosity, with an eye for vivid detail, and with a conviction that true revelation of place lay in the representative and ordinary. He carried with him as well certain intellectual, cultural, and social views common to his Protestant New England upper-middle class background. The young De Forest, unburdened by the modern travel writer's awareness that any "foreign" environment is to some degree an imaginary construct of the perceiver, carried his cultural baggage unself- consciously, revealing not only fresh and vivid detail of life in the Near East but also much about the American concept of and attitude toward the Near East in the 1840s and 50s. One focus of this paper is on the difference in attitude with which De Forest approached the Near East and Europe.
De Forest's nearly five-year sojourn in Europe began in 1850. By that time he had completed his first book and signed a contract for its publication. A small inheritance had left him, for a few years at least, financially free. Furthermore, he had satisfied his New England conscience--he felt morally justified in abandoning America for Europe, duty for pleasure: the spas of Europe would turn him (he who had been from childhood physically fragile) into a fit specimen of American manhood. France, Italy, the spas of Germany and Switzerland--the locales of European Acquaintance are typical enough for the nineteenth-century American traveller. De Forest, however, was no passionate pilgrim, no romantic standing rapt before the antique and picturesque. Foreshadowing the realistic novelist he was to become, De Forest gives us a finely-rendered set of people going about their daily activities: enjoying their dinner and a good wine, discussing the topics of the day--hydropathy, mesmerism, phrenology; dancing or playing "Cat and Rat" after dinner. What was it like to take the water cure at a German spa in the 1850s? De Forest's account convinces us that the regimen would either kill or cure. What was it like to be young and free in Florence on a spring evening in 1853? De Forest assures us that the young American traveller let neither his conscience nor his guidebook obscure his view of a pretty Italian woman or dull his appreciation of a second bottle of Montepulciano wine. On long winter nights at a spa in the French Alps De Forest debated politics, religion, and social conventions with minor European nobility and an occasional French radical progressive. De Forest writes that when he first settled among the French speakers at the spa, he thought his dictionnaire de poche was authored by a Mr. Poche and that he "stared in astonishment" at his friend Jolivet's rejection of Christianity and his pessimism about the "stable and equal" nature of American democracy.
De Forest was not melted down and cast into a new mold by his cosmopolitan experiences, but he was enlightened and tempered. He returned to America in 1855, healthy and hopeful, planning to make a living as a writer, a writer who would depict America objectively and realistically. Although readers of the 1860s and 70s were not comfortable enough with De Forest's rational detachment or his sharp satire to make him a best-selling novelist, his place in American literature is assured. His non-fiction works, A Volunteer's Adventures: A Union Captain's Record of the Civil War and A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, are important social and historical documents written with the novelist's eye for telling detail and ear for the cadence of a sentence. His novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), one of the earliest works of American realism, has been widely acknowledged by critics as perhaps the greatest of Civil War novels. A reading of Oriental Acquaintance and European Acquaintance shows that in these two travel narratives De Forest developed many of the characteristics for which the best of his later works have been praised.
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